The opioid epidemic is crushing America’s middle class. We need action, not words

From afar, America’s opioid epidemic may seem like just another sensationalised scare story in a country constantly at war with drugs. But this is not a fad, nor an overblown segment on morning television. It is real, it is decimating entire counties, and it represents the summation of the country’s failures towards its own citizens over decades.

Twenty million Americans have some form of opioid addiction, and those addictions kill almost 150 people every day.

Twenty million is a shocking number of people for whom the ordinary act of living is crushing. An opioid addiction is fundamentally an instinct to numb, to sleep, to exist unencumbered. It is made possible by over-prescription from doctors and aggressive lobbying from pharmaceutical companies, but it reflects the deeper malaise of places and people whose lives have few prospects for dramatic improvement. As we saw last November, that malaise has become desperation, and that desperation now covers a vast swathe of the electorate.

America was never a feudal society, and so our national mythology does not include a character who exemplifies the nobility of poverty; in a country of pilgrims and pioneers, driven by Calvinist mores, being poor suggests that you’re just not working hard enough. Faced with a society where poverty is considered a deficiency of both morals and material wealth, and where it has become more difficult to outdo your parents, it is easy to see how a life enslaved to the brief release of opioids seems preferable to one spent in the ugly realities of hardship.

The death toll has been staggering. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 64,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year – the whole 20 years of the Vietnam War, by contrast, cost 58,000 American lives.

Between 1999 and 2015, drugs killed 560,000 Americans; over the next decade, they are expected to take another half million lives. These are the kind of numbers that make you sit up and wonder how there aren’t daily protests outside the Food and Drug Administration’s headquarters – until you realise that many of those affected by this crisis gave up on the idea of change, or even hope, a long time ago. If you believe, as so many Americans do, that everything from voting to the economic system itself is rigged, why would you bother trying to change things?

In the wake of the financial crisis, when a generation (my generation) was told that the white-collar jobs for which they’d spent 20 years and a small fortune preparing were no longer available, many dissembled entirely. In previous generations, being a middle-class white kid in America guaranteed a life devoid of difficult decisions; suddenly, the system (and the social contract which came with it) collapsed. With the purposeful numbness of the corporate world out of reach, many chose a different sort of numbing agent. And so what began as “hillbilly heroin” went mainstream,

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion snaking its way through leafy suburbs up and down the East Coast.

Nevertheless, the reinvention of heroin and opioids as scourges of “nice” families means that drug reform and rehabilitation are stamped in bold type on to the conservative political agenda. Nearly every GOP candidate in the crowded 2016 primary spent time stomping around New England and the Rust Belt, partaking in the grief of families who had lost children or spouses to this epidemic, and offering aggressive plans for reform.

President Donald Trump announced in August that he would declare opioid abuse a national emergency, a mechanism ordinarily deployed after natural disasters. It appears that this declaration could be coming early next week, although its parameters, and thus its efficacy in addressing a problem as systemic as opioid abuse, remain unclear. It is difficult to imagine any successful intervention in this crisis that stops at methadone clinics, naloxone for overdoses and needle exchanges. Addiction perpetuates the cycles of poverty, but it is also a symptom of that poverty and the despair that accompanies it.

Creating hope in communities where the lights went out years ago is key to preventing the creation of future addicts, and to convincing current addicts that society can offer them something better than a few hours of escape.

It is time for this administration to move past flashy announcements, and to settle into the grunt work of crafting policy that tackles the effects, but also the root causes, of opioid addiction.

Molly Kiniry is a researcher at the Legatum Institute

Victor Lewis-Smith once joked that you can always tell if someone went to Oxbridge because they’ll mention it within the first five minutes of meeting you. Today, the focus is on who didn’t go. Labour MP David Lammy has dug up some astonishing statistics: nearly half of all offers made by Oxford and Cambridge from 2010 to 2015 went to kids from London and the South East. During that period, only three Oxford colleges made an offer to a black British A-level applicant every year. And the top two social classes have seen their share of offers rise.

It’s important that we don’t obsess about Oxbridge: many talented adolescents make a positive choice not to go there because there are plenty of other universities that are elite in their own regard. But Oxbridge remains a gateway to science, business, law, media and politics, and the under-representation of certain groups is a sad reflection upon Britain’s decline in social mobility.

The dons know this and they’re embarrassed by it. I’ve taught at both universities and can confirm that they would bend over backwards to take a student from a disadvantaged background. The implication that, say, naked racial prejudice determines who does or doesn’t get a place doesn’t reflect the cultural values of contemporary academia. Nor is it the job of higher education to try to make society more equal or compensate

The death toll has been staggering. The Centre for Disease Control estimates that last year 64,000 Americans died of drug overdoses – 20 years of the Vietnam War cost 58,000 American lives

Some people are born with luck and money. It’s the job of state schools – not academics – to level the playing field by raising their own game

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